A TALE OF TWO STATES: EXPLORING ACCESSIBILITY TO COMMUNITY COLLEGE IN CALIFORNIA AND TEXAS

As communities emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, new questions related to the movement of people and goods must be addressed. Transportation systems have been severely impacted by the shifts in activity patterns with the use of transit and office space being the most prominent. These changes will generate new discussions amongst planners and decision-makers about how to prioritize transportation funding investments in systems such as public transit. The decisions made will impact transportation access to activities that communities seek to interact with. For many, community colleges remain an integral component of higher education in the United States and an activity that requires a plethora of commute trips. These institutions, which rarely provide on-campus housing, provide opportunities for students to obtain course credits that work towards associate degrees, certificate training programs, or that can transfer to an institution granting bachelor’s degrees. Transportation access to community college in the United States is an important issue of transportation equity but remains a relatively understudied topic in the literature. To help fill this gap, this study seeks to provide an important examination of broader transportation access to community colleges in the states of California and Texas. A haversine distance matrix from each census tract centroid to each community college campus within both states is calculated. Correlations between distance metrics and select demographic variables from the American Community Survey are estimated to analyze association. This study is intended to help provide information to transportation practitioners on the status of transportation challenges that community college students across the nation may face when attempting to travel to campus by examining access in the two largest states in the United States.